Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

By G. W. Bowersock

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents a searching examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of a late resurgent Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes by underscoring the importance of the Byzantine Empire’s defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region and thus provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611683226

G. W. Bowersock

G. W. Bowersock is Professor of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Among his many books are Roman Arabia (1983) and Hellenism in Late Antiquity (1990).

Book preview

EMPIRES IN COLLISION IN LATE ANTIQUITY

G. W. BOWERSOCK

THE MENAHEM STERN

JERUSALEM LECTURES

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF ISRAEL

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2012 Historical Society of Israel

All rights reserved

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval and Charlemagne by Passumpsic Publishing

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bowersock, G. W. (Glen Warren), 1936–

Empires in collision in late antiquity / G. W. Bowersock.

p. cm.—(The Menahem Stern Jerusalem lectures)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-320-2 (cloth: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61168-321-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-1-61168-322-6 (ebook)

1. Middle East—Civilization—To 622. 2. Middle East—History—

To 622. 3. Iran—Civilization—To 640. 4. Iran—History—

To 640. 5. Byzantine Empire—Civilization—To 527. I. Title.

DS57.B69    2012

939.4—dc23       2012006311

CONTENTS

Foreword by Albert I. Baumgarten

Preface

1

Byzantium, Ethiopia, and the Jewish Kingdom of South Arabia

2

The Persian Capture of Jerusalem

3

Heraclius’ Gift to Islam The Death of the Persian Empire

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

The lectures that follow were delivered by Professor Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as the 2011 Jerusalem Lectures in History in Memory of Menahem Stern. Over the last fifteen series of these Jerusalem lectures we, the audience in Jerusalem and then the readers of the published versions, have traveled far and wide in European and Eastern History. By design, only a few of the lecturers and their topics have been close to the issues that were the heart of Professor Stern’s own scholarship. With this year’s lectures, however, we return to a topic closer to Stern’s major contributions. Many of the ancient authors who figure prominently in Bowersock’s scholarship also have a place in Stern’s collection of Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, with the Emperor Julian the most prominent among many examples.

I would like to divide my introductory remarks to these lectures into three sections: (1) first a very brief summary of Professor Bowersock’s scholarly career, next (2) a longer discussion of some of his major contributions, and then, finally (3) a few words intended to set the stage for the pages that follow, in which Bowersock will speak for himself.

SCHOLARLY CAREER

Bowersock, as already noted, returned to Jerusalem, as Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, having been an active faculty member there from 1980 to 2006. The Stern lectureship is only one in a long series of distinguished academic responsibilities and invitations, which include the Jerome Lectures at Michigan and the Sather Lectures at Berkeley, to mention two of the most widely known examples, lectureships that have also yielded two of Bowersock’s most innovative and original books, to which I will refer below.

CONTRIBUTION

In preparing this brief introduction, I read and reread any number of Bowersock’s books. While doing that, I kept being reminded of a statement of the most fundamental quality of the historian’s craft, as stated by Christopher Hill (1912–2003), one of the great figures in the study of seventeenth-century England, active in the previous century. In one of his last books, The English Bible in the Seventeenth- Century Revolution (1993), p. 437, Hill wrote: I remember being struck when I read, at an impressionable age, T. S. Eliot on the art of the poet. ‘A poet’s mind . . . is constantly amalgamating disparate experience. The ordinary man . . . falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of the cooking: in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.’ . . . Good—imaginative—history is akin to retrospective poetry. It is about life as lived—as much of it as we can recapture. Forming new wholes out of all sorts of seemingly disparate and endless varieties of evidence, in order to get the feel of how people lived in the past and in what ways their sensitivities differed from ours, Hill suggested, was the essence of the historian’s labors. And doing that successfully, at the highest possible level, Hill argued, required extra-ordinary skills, beginning with the widest sort of knowledge of every possible kind of relevant source. If that were not challenge enough, the historian also needed to be blessed with the touch of the poet, which would bring this information together into new wholes.

My insight into Bowersock, based on Hill-Eliot, was then confirmed by the title of the collection of essays issued in the aftermath of the conference held to honor Bowersock’s retirement from the Institute for Advanced Study in 2006—T. Corey Brennan and Harriet I. Flower (eds.), East & West: Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock (2008)—and then especially by its introductory chapter by Aldo Schiavone. Schiavone borrowed the title of his contribution to the volume from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, calling it Only Connect. Indeed, as Schiavone elaborated, and I am happy to attest personally, Bowersock is the master of connecting scholars from all over the world with each other and with their work. As Schiavone noted, Bowersock has been an authoritative and prestigious go-between, to whom we have been able to turn and whose help has often been crucial.

But that is only the beginning of the stories of the connections and new wholes that I would like to tell. These connections and new wholes run the entire length of Bowersock’s scholarly activities and publications—which number some 379 books, reviews, and articles, at the time of writing this introduction—from the first to the last. His first book, Augustus and the Greek World (1965), set the stage for numerous studies to follow by illuminating the ways in which Athens was brought into the Roman empire. The erudition on display was overwhelming. One detailed prosopographical study of the careers of Greeks connected to Augustan Rome